Cognitive Psychology 1: Attention, Memory, and Language

Comprehensive practice vocabulary flashcards covering the core themes of Cognitive Psychology 1: selective and divided attention, short-term and working memory models, long-term memory structures and processes, everyday applied memory, psycholinguistic theories of speech, and reading models.

Attention

The conscious or unconscious selection of information for cognitive processing (Chun et al., 2011), characterized by William James (1890) as the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought.

Cocktail Party Effect

The cognitive phenomenon in which an individual is able to focus auditory attention on a single conversation amid multiple loud, competing background conversations, while still remaining capable of having attention captured by salient, personally meaningful stimuli such as their own name.

Dichotic Listening

An experimental paradigm introduced by Cherry (1953) where participants receive distinct auditory inputs simultaneously in each ear through headphones and are instructed to shadow (repeat aloud) the message in the target ear while ignoring the non-attended ear.

Broadbent's Filter Model

An early-selection bottleneck theory of attention (Broadbent, 1958) proposing that all incoming sensory signals are registered in parallel, but a selective filter allows only a single channel to pass through to the limited-capacity decision channel based purely on physical characteristics without semantic analysis.

Pre-attentive Processes

Rapid ($200\text{--}250\text{ ms}$), automatic, and parallel preliminary perceptual operations that analyze raw physical characteristics (such as pitch, loudness, spatial location, and color) before selective focal attention is engaged.

Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) in Selective Attention

An autonomic electrodermal measure utilized by Corteen and Wood (1972) demonstrating that conditioned shock-associated city names presented in an unattended ear produced increased skin conductance, providing evidence of pre-attentive semantic processing.

Treisman's Attenuation Model

A flexible, two-stage attention theory (Treisman, 1960) proposing that unattended auditory inputs are not completely blocked, but are attenuated (weakened in signal intensity), allowing stimuli with low activation thresholds (such as one's own name) to reach semantic processing and conscious awareness.

Norman's Pertinence Model

A late-selection theory of attention (Norman, 1969; 1975) asserting that all sensory inputs activate long-term memory representations without a physical bottleneck, with the depth of processing determined dynamically by an item's current pertinence value and contextual expectations.

Divided Attention

The cognitive process of allocating attentional resources across two or more separate sensory stimuli at once, or performing two or more distinct tasks simultaneously.

Central Capacity Theory

A single-resource model of divided attention proposed by Kahneman (1973) positing a flexible, limited pool of central processing resources whose total available capacity fluctuates with physiological arousal and is distributed among tasks by an allocation policy.

Multiple Resource Theory

A divided attention framework developed by Wickens (1984) proposing that attentional capacity is distributed across separate, specialized cognitive resource pools defined along three dimensions: input/output modalities, stages of processing, and information codes (spatial vs. verbal).

Yerkes-Dodson Law

An empirical relationship between arousal and performance indicating an inverted-U curve, where performance peaks at moderate levels of arousal and drops off at very low or very high arousal; simple tasks peak at higher arousal levels than complex tasks.

Automatisation Stages

The three-stage model of motor and cognitive skill acquisition identified by Fitts and Posner (1967): the Cognitive Stage (conscious, effortful, serial), the Associative Stage (error detection, elimination, and speed-up), and the Autonomous Stage (rapid, automatic, parallel, and capacity-free).

Involuntary Attention

An exogenous, bottom-up attentional capture triggered automatically by salient, novel, or unexpected environmental stimuli occurring without conscious, voluntary goal direction.

Stroop Effect

A demonstration of automatic processing (Stroop, 1935) wherein participants experience increased latency and error rates when naming the font ink color of a written word if the ink color is incongruent with the word's semantic meaning (e.g., the word 'RED' printed in blue ink).

Change Blindness

The failure to detect substantial changes to objects or scenes when the change occurs simultaneously with a brief visual disruption, saccade, or occlusion, as seen when $25\%$ of pilots landed an aircraft simulator without noticing a plane blocking the runway (Haines, 1991).

Modal Model of Memory

The classic structural memory architecture formulated by Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968) positing that information flows sequentially through three distinct stores: sensory registers, a limited-capacity short-term store (STS), and an enduring long-term store (LTS).

Digit Span

A standard psychometric measure of short-term memory capacity defined by the maximum sequence length of digits an individual can recall in correct serial order, classically established by Miller (1956) as $7 \pm 2$ items, or approximately $3\text{--}4$ chunks.

Patient K.F.

A neurological patient documented by Shallice and Warrington (1970) who showed severely impaired short-term memory (digit span of less than two) alongside intact long-term memory formation, establishing a double dissociation against the Modal Model.

Central Executive

The modality-free supervisory component of Baddeley's working memory model that coordinates attentional resources among slave systems and manages three executive functions: inhibition, shifting, and updating (Miyake et al., 2000).

Phonological Loop

A slave component of Baddeley's working memory model specialized for verbal and speech-based material, consisting of a passive temporary phonological store and an active sub-vocal articulatory rehearsal process.

Phonological Similarity Effect

The empirical finding that immediate serial recall is significantly worse for lists of words that sound alike (e.g., man, can, pan) compared to lists of acoustically dissimilar words (e.g., fee, cow, bar), confirming phonological coding in working memory.

Visuo-Spatial Sketchpad

A component of Baddeley's working memory model dedicated to processing visual and spatial material, fractionated by Logie (1995) into a passive visual cache (storing form and color) and an inner scribe (handling spatial and movement sequences).

Episodic Buffer

A multi-dimensional storage component with a capacity of approximately $4$ chunks, added to the working memory model by Baddeley (2000) to integrate and temporarily store information from the phonological loop, visuo-spatial sketchpad, and long-term memory into coherent episodes.

Levels of Processing Theory

A cognitive framework proposed by Craik and Lockhart (1972) asserting that memory trace durability and retention are direct functions of the depth of mental analysis at encoding, ranging from shallow physical/structural processing to deep semantic analysis.

Encoding Specificity Principle

Tulving's (1979) principle stating that successful retrieval is maximized when the environmental, physical, and cognitive cues present during retrieval match the informational context stored in the memory trace at original encoding.

Double Dissociation in Declarative Memory

The clinical demonstration that episodic and semantic memory are functionally distinct, exemplified by developmental amnesic patients Beth, Jon, and Kate who showed impaired episodic recall with preserved semantic learning (Vargha-Khadem et al., 1997), contrasted with Patient M.N. who showed preserved episodic recall but severely impaired semantic knowledge (Yasuda et al., 1997).

Henke's Processing-Based Model

A neuroarchitectural framework (Henke, 2010) classifying long-term memory systems not by conscious awareness, but by underlying processing demands: rapid encoding of flexible associations (hippocampus), slow encoding of rigid associations (basal ganglia/cerebellum), and rapid encoding of single unitized items (parahippocampal gyrus).

Autobiographical Memory

Long-term declarative memory for personal events and life experiences across the lifespan, structured within a hierarchical conceptual self comprising lifetime periods, general events, and event-specific episodic details (Conway, 2005).

Flashbulb Memory

Unusually vivid, highly detailed, and exceptionally enduring recollections of the personal circumstances surrounding how an individual first learned of an unexpected, shocking, and emotionally significant event (Brown & Kulik, 1977).

Childhood Amnesia

The near-total absence of autobiographical memories from before age $3$, explained by the emergence of the cognitive self and language acquisition (Jack & Hayne, 2010) alongside rapid early hippocampal neurogenesis (Josselyn & Frankland, 2012).

Reminiscence Bump

The empirical tendency for older adults over age $40$ to recall a disproportionately high frequency of autobiographical memories from adolescence and early adulthood (ages $10\text{--}30$), largely corresponding to positive cultural life script events (Rubin & Berntsen, 2003).

Life Script

Culturally shared expectations regarding the normative timing and chronological sequence of major life transitions (such as university, marriage, career, and children) that structure autobiographical recall in adulthood (Rubin & Berntsen, 2003).

Prospective Memory

The cognitive capability to remember to carry out an intended action in the future, categorized either as event-based (triggered by external environmental cues) or time-based (executed at a specific hour or after a time delay).

Misinformation Effect

The distortion or contamination of an eyewitness's original memory trace caused by exposure to misleading post-event information or leading interrogative language (Loftus & Palmer, 1974).

Weapon Focus Effect

The attentional phenomenon whereby eyewitnesses to an armed crime disproportionately concentrate their visual gaze on the perpetrator's weapon, leading to impaired recall of peripheral details such as the perpetrator's facial appearance (Biggs et al., 2013).

Cognitive Interview

A structured investigative interviewing technique formulated by Geiselman and Fisher (1997) that enhances eyewitness recall through mental context reinstatement, exhaustive reporting, chronological reversal, and alternative perspective taking.

Retrograde vs. Anterograde Amnesia

Neuropsychological memory impairments differentiated by injury onset: Retrograde amnesia denotes loss of access to episodic events experienced prior to brain damage, whereas Anterograde amnesia denotes an inability to consolidate new episodic memories following brain damage.

Testing Effect

The empirical finding that actively retrieving information through practice testing results in significantly greater long-term memory retention than spending equivalent time restudying the material (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006).

Constructive Memory

The psychological reality that memory retrieval is not a literal, verbatim playback of recorded events, but an active reconstructive process that combines stored traces with prior schemas, contextual inferences, and post-event information.

Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) Paradigm

An experimental memory task where participants study lists of words semantically related to an unpresented critical lure word; spreading semantic activation causes false recognition or recall of the non-presented critical lure at high rates.

Hockett's Design Features

A formal framework of linguistic characteristics proposed by Hockett (1960) distinguishing human language from non-human communication, uniquely highlighting displacement, openness (productivity), arbitrariness, and duality of patterning.

Universal Grammar

Chomsky's nativist theory proposing that human infants are biologically endowed with an innate, pre-programmed language acquisition faculty containing abstract syntactic rules underlying all natural languages, differentiating competence from performance.

Mental Lexicon

The internal cognitive dictionary in long-term memory that stores comprehensive representations of words, including their phonology (sounds), orthography (spelling), semantics (meaning), and syntactic grammatical constraints.

Speech Act Theory

A pragmatic linguistic theory (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1976) positing that verbal utterances constitute actions, comprising the locution (the literal utterance), the illocutionary force (the speaker's intended social function), and the perlocutionary force (the actual effect on the listener).

Grice's Co-operative Principle

An inferential framework (Grice, 1967) stating that conversational partners operate under an implicit assumption of cooperation governed by four communicative maxims: Quantity (informativeness), Quality (truthfulness), Relation (relevance), and Manner (clarity).

Politeness Model

A sociopragmatic framework developed by Brown and Levinson (1987) proposing that speakers frequently deploy indirect speech acts and conversational facework strategies to mitigate threats to positive and negative face.

E-Z Reader Model

A computational model of eye-movement control during reading (Reichle et al., 1998; 2015) positing that word identification occurs serially, with decisions to trigger saccadic motor programs determined during an early stage of lexical processing.

Dual-Route Cascaded (DRC) Model

A computational architecture of visual word recognition and reading aloud (Coltheart et al., 2001) positing two parallel mechanisms: a direct lexical route accessing the orthographic lexicon and semantics, and an indirect sublexical route converting graphemes to phonemes.

Triple Route Model

An expanded reading architecture (Ellis & Young, 1988) comprising three parallel pathways: Route 1 (sublexical grapheme-phoneme conversion for novel and non-words), Route 2 (lexical-semantic pathway for content words), and Route 3 (direct visual-to-phonological lexicon pathway without semantic mediation, specialized for function words).